WW2

08/16/2017

One effect of the persecutions in Germany has been to prevent antisemitism from being seriously studied. In England a brief inadequate survey was made by Mass Observation a year or two ago, but if there has been any other investigation of the subject, then its findings have been kept strictly secret. At the same time there has been conscious suppression, by all thoughtful people, of anything likely to wound Jewish susceptibilities. After 1934 the Jew joke disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals and the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short story came to be regarded as antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was De Rigueur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs — a decision which might be correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not criticise them. Thanks to Hitler, therefore, you had a situation in which the press was in effect censored in favour of the Jews while in private antisemitism was on the up-grade, even, to some extent, among sensitive and intelligent people. This was particularly noticeable in 1940 at the time of the internment of the refugees. Naturally, every thinking person felt that it was his duty to protest against the wholesale locking-up of unfortunate foreigners who for the most part were only in England because they were opponents of Hitler. Privately, however, one heard very different sentiments expressed. A minority of the refugees behaved in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them necessarily had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews. A very eminent figure in the Labour Party — I won't name him, but he is one of the most respected people in England — said to me quite violently: “We never asked these people to come to this country. If they choose to come here, let them take the consequences.” Yet this man would as a matter of course have associated himself with any kind of petition or manifesto against the internment of aliens. This feeling that antisemitism is something sinful and disgraceful, something that a civilised person does not suffer from, is unfavourable to a scientific approach, and indeed many people will admit that they are frightened of probing too deeply into the subject. They are frightened, that is to say, of discovering not only that antisemitism is spreading, but that they themselves are infected by it.--Orwell, (1945) "Antisemitism in Britain."

That Donald Trump is willing to express his racism has long been obvious since David Letterman made it visible in 2011-12. Even then it was clear (to Entertainment Weekly) he was considering a political run. Unlike Letterman, and most commentators I read, I was not surprised that he held racist views 'in America today.' In fact, such a belief in individual moral progress, which springs from a desire for the sinner's redemption, prevents clear thinking.*

Call me an Augustinian, if you wish, but most people are rotten enough to have negative views about some other group of people (recall). Ideally, the out-group is far away, and then our views, which may not be our ruling passions, have no consequence. When we live among the other group, we exercise self-command due to the judgments of our better selves, public norms, company policies, and enlightened self-interest (the offended may be our colleagues, business partners, etc.); so we exhibit self-command unless we feel at ease enough -- say, because of alcohol and the company of the demographic like-minded -- to express some of our rot. Sometimes, sudden stress, panic, and anger make us forget our self-command and we act on our wrong impulses (as some badly trained US police-officers have been caught doing). If the public norms are strong enough, they support a wide gap between our private views and the impartial laws of the land, then our private views are largely irrelevant to political life even if we can create local nuisance or worse. Of course, the previous paragraph presupposes two liberal commitments: (i) the utility of a distinction between private and public; (ii) the significance and value of impartial law.

Ideal circumstances rarely obtain. A key factor today is that offense against social norms is profitable in our media economy. It sells in two ways: as humor (see Justin Smith) and as (aesthetic) spectacle. By 'spectacle,' I mean, it creates gripping, attention-grabbing imagery on-line and on TV. The for-profit media, thus, have an incentive to promote funny characters that offend against social norms.** What makes Letterman's comments (ca 2012) so useful is because it reminds us that Donald Trump's media presence was promoted long after it became clear that he not only harbored intense racist views, and as a landlord acted on them, but that (already back in 1989) he was actively promoting racist outcomes in public life (the Central Park 5) long before he encouraged birtherism. The fact that (and again just listen to Letterman) that he was very wealthy, funny, and not stupid encouraged the media to keep giving him air time and so spread his views that violate existing social norms. Once the genie was out of the bottle, any outlet that refused to play along was leaving dollars on the table because Trump has perfected the art of creating often funny, self-reinforcing media spectacles that turn on his persona. A third liberal commitment, the (iii) freedom for profitable speech became a launching path for Trump's political career.

In addition to being profitable to the media, the attention aided Trump's political rise. In the presidential campaign, this rise was facilitated, first, by the inability of his (Republican) opponents to take him seriously as a political force and, then, the Clinton campaign team blundered by turning the election into a referendum on his character, thus, playing straight into his media strengths. That the Clinton campaign failed to grasp these dynamics is especially astounding because Bill Clinton's first presidential run was propelled by him turning the (racialized, law & order) execution of Ricky Ray Rector into a favorable spectacle.

That liberal democracies elect flawed, even racist characters to power is no surprise. It is also no surprise that they do so, in part, because these characters are racists. As I remarked before, when (parts of) electorates understand their own situations as zero-sum, it is completely rational for them to wish to be represented by characters who they take to be on their side (recall here; and here)--and ethnic identification is, precisely because it is so visceral, a useful heuristic toward group solidarity.*** Donald Trump's response to Charlottesville tells you that he is gambling on the fact that many voters will vote for him, again, primarily because of his willingness to support rather intense ethnic identification. I would not bet against him, although it is entirely possible to defeat such a program if other factors are made more salient. That is to say, the conversation needs to be changed--as long as Trump's persona is the center of attention he has good chances of staying in power.

Technological surveillance and monitoring capabilities have collapsed the capacity to maintain a meaningful distinction between private and public. Only a draconian law could maintain the distinction. But there is no reason to expect such a law to be even modestly impartial. And it is manifestly obvious that the proponents of such a law would propose it as a tool to silence critics. For, above I treated the rule of law as an abstraction, but, of course, the impartiality and decency of law rest on human judgment (to interpret, to enforce, and to adjudicate). President Trump and his team are shaping these processes even further toward ethnic partiality (aided by other interests, who also happen to benefit). Along the way, they signal increasingly that would-be-violators of the law, such as it is, can count on ethnic solidarity and presidential pardons. Because the executive branch is a vast direct and indirect patronage network, it has ample opportunities to attract talented public servants (some of this encouraged by misguided philosophers) and reward their loyalty. Even minimal competence is sufficient to sustain itself for quite a while.+ It is foreseeable that as trust in the rule of law is further eroded, conflict and chaos will increase and, thereby, strengthen the public's tolerance for ethno-nationalist, authoritarian rule.

The experience of the last hundred years tells us that even imperfect, liberal democracies, many of them with a history of racialized empire and domestic, ethnic hierarchy, can survive stagnating incomes, oligarchic privilege, the collapse/bail-outs of financial sector, and even total war. So, it is not impossible that the liberal form of constitutional government can survive a Trump (who is mortal) presidency. But even when his ethnic-nationalist program gets defeated some day Stateside, or if liberalism has to retreat permanently to the world's margins, the theoretical challenge is, in part, to think what liberalism could be without a meaningful distinction between private and public, while we continue to embrace freedom for profitable speech which makes ethno-nationalism so rewarding.++

07/17/2017

When you walk through a town like this--two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in--when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk, as you break your way through the prickly pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over skeletons....

All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm-tree and the distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting to look at.

It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm-trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live here for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.--George Orwell (1939) Marrakech

Yesterday morning, while watching my son and his friends sell lemonade and cookies to raise money for the Grenfell Towers victims and the Royal Free -- a refrain they repeated all morning long, most effectively when they would corner a passer-by ready to climb up to the Heath -- on the South End, I was reminded, because I checked my email absentmindedly on my phone, that a promised tenure and promotion letter is due in two weeks; at once I recognized the foolishness of my intention to finish two overdue papers -- both in late stages of draft -- before I go on holiday this Friday (which becomes the de facto deadline for that tenure letter). After our lunch, we went to Daunt's to buy him a book, and there, while browsing, I noticed the Penguin edition of Orwell's Essays. I checked the index, and marked that "Reflections on Ghandi" -- an essay I blogged about admiringly, twice, in fact, [and here] -- was the last one. The collection lacks an editor and while I puzzled over my previous lack of curiosity about his other essays, my son called me from the sales counter; he was ready for me to pay for his selection. I grabbed the Essays and was secretly relieved when my son informed me he was too tired to frisbee and insisted on reading his book.

These days tourists still go to starved countries, but while for Orwell, "people with brown skins are next door to invisible," now the locals and their skin colors are noticed. I wouldn't say that it is the main purpose to return home from holiday in a packed, charter flight hungover while a kid is crying for the tablet in the row behind you, but we should not ignore the frisson of informing the neighbors, after some obligatory remarks about the shocking ways children are prostituted, that they lack sanitation and have too many babies, that we have a proper work ethic, and so on. (If you protest, my dear reader, that you would not be caught dead in a charter, I remind you of the pictures you posted on Instagram of yourself and your healthy friends enjoying a hearty meal after a day's volunteering in a dusty, crowded refugee camp.)* As Orwell puts it (in his remarkable essay, "Antisemitism in Britain,")"we are all more or less subject to this lunacy of believing that whole races or nations are mysteriously good or mysteriously evil."+

Orwell's Marrakech is about what it's like be an imperial master on the edge of the precipice, which is represented by the Senegalese soldiers, French citizens, who march by a "long, dusty column, infantry, screw-gun batteries and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron wheels." At that point there is,

one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a Socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they tum their guns in the other direction?"

It was curious, really. Every white man there has this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the white NCOs marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really it was almost like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of paper.

Orwell's point is not to deny that colonial empires are gained through military force. But, rather, to insist that empires are kept through a master-servant ideology in which the imperial rulers dehumanize the conquered in various ways [invisible work; mass-anonymity; seen as animals; etc.], and makes him the enforcer of his own chains. Orwell assumes here the power of (the propagandist's) education and military drilling. (I am probably not the first to notice that the characterization of totalitarianism in 1984, owes something to his experience of being on the empire's side in colonial rule.) Orwell's faith in the power of education is not infinite--it's a matter of time before the game is up, and the guns are turned--but he does not underestimate it either. But beneath the facade of virile, imperial strength, he reveals a quiet terror, so manifest today in America's behavior toward its blacks and the Europeans toward its 'non-natives,' that the tables will be turned.

In context, Orwell is not much interested in the phenomenology of the oppressed even though he is capable of generating sympathy for them. He does not make the leap into Ellison's perspective, avant la lettre. It's not because he is incapable of writing from perspectives other than his own (-- I will return to his treatment of passive helplessness in "Inside the Whale"), after all the essay starts with an imaginative interpretation of the behavior of flies.** But Orwell's topic is to chart a certain psychological void at the heart of "modern civilization." Orwell exhibits colonial mastery (with the rhetorical trick of making visible that which he claims stays invisible) in order to make expressible set of experiences that survive the fall of empire as such.

That is, I suspect dark skins may be noticed by tourists now because of the end of direct military rule. But our military and technological superiority has not ended. So, the relationships of subordination and superiority have not evaporated (merely displaced), and the dark skins encountered abroad are inevitably, it seems, tracked with narratives that extol our (non-existent) moral superiority over them.

The surge of fondness for closed border-walls is a sign of fearful weakness--not merely a wise recognition of limits, but a retreat. The desire to keep them out, is a collective admission of our terror that the game is nearly up and we'll be treated the way we raped and killed them.

I looked up from Orwell's essays, my mind uneasily shifting to the morning's scene with the happy children singing and dancing selling the fresh lemonade and delicious, sprinkled cookies and (ahh) brownies, and just then I refuse to finish my train of ideas. For, after we had installed ourselves at the cafe, I glanced furtively -- guiltily aware of my prior lack of interest -- at the title of of the book I had bought for my son, who was reading it hungrily; it was David Walliams' The World’s Worst Children 2.

04/18/2017

The nineteenth century bestowed upon us the amalgamation of nation and state. Since Jews everywhere were loyal to the state--you do recall, don't you?--they had to attempt to shed their nationality, they had to assimilate. The twentieth century has shown us the ultimate consequences of nationalism, as evidenced by horrible relocations of peoples and various massacres, beginning with the Armenians and Ukrainian pogroms. The British Commonwealth reveals--in a distorted form, as is often, indeed usually the case--the rudiments of a new arrangement. Someone who is part of the British Empire does not therefore cease to be an Indian or a Canadian. That is another reason why this war--and the existence of England, the last bulwark against the new barbarism--is so important for us. Belief in a single homogeneous European nation is belief in a utopia--and not a pretty one at that. Such a belief could originate only in America--and then only on the basis of a United Europe. But I do not think it is utopian to hope for the possibility of a commonwealth of European nations with a parliament of its own.--Hannah Arendt (1940) "The Minority Question" in The Jewish Writings, p. 130.

It surely was utopian to imagine a commonwealth of European nations with a parliament of its own any time in 1940 (and not just because it is a rhetorical trope of utopian literature to explicitly deny being utopian).* Leaving that aside, it is striking that the parliament is proposed as an alternative to a single homogeneous European nation--undoubtedly a nod to the racialized, murderous eugenics of the Nazis, whom did not even accept (as Sean Spicer artfully recently reminded us) assimilated minorities as belonging to the people. Strikingly enough Arendt treats the belief in the effort to generate a homogeneous nation as indebted to American thought. (That's historically well-founded; see here for recent scholarship.)

I view these Digressions as an indirect, oblique commentary on the day's newspaper headlines; so today there is some irony in reading how Arendt treats her own proposal as partially inspired by the British Empire, which she interprets as facilitating multiple overlapping identities. Oddly enough, her proposal is reminiscent (recall) of Adam Smith's ill-fated proposal for an imperial parliament for the British empire in which multiple nations co-existist. England (by which she clearly means to refer to Great Britain) matters in another sense because she takes it to be "bulwark" against the tendency toward national homogeneity which is characteristic of modern times.

Arendt proposes her commonwealth of European nations with a parliament of its own in order to address the political weakness of minorities within the nation state, especially minorities that lack a home-land state. (She treats the homeland not so much as a possible refuge, but more as possible advocate for one's brethren in another state.) One may wonder how effective parliamentary systems really are in protecting minorities (a lot depends on technical details of the nature of the franchise, the system of representation, the relationship with the judiciary/executive, etc.).

Here I want to close by noting that the Treaty of Rome, the key founding documents, echoes Arendt's language. (I am not claiming influence--it's my sense that this bit of writing was largely unknown.) That Treaty (recall) speaks of an "ever closer union among the peoples of Europe" not the nation-states of Europe. As is well known, the EU never got around developing a truly powerful assembly or parliament let alone much interested in protecting Europe's minorities (although that sentence is unfair to particular parliamentarians). Instead, despite the existence of article 7, the protection of minorities was farmed out to the European Court of Human Rights. Because its judgments are always delayed, post facto, and, one is sad to note, not always friendly to Europe's minorities it's pretty clear by now that it offers little protection against determined, illiberal states in Europe's midst.

02/14/2017

My father, Manfred Stanley, passed away in 2004. By the normal methods of calculating such things, he was not a wealthy man. What he lacked in material resources he more than made up for in other ways. In addition to thousands of his books, I have many boxes of his family effects, including hundreds of letters.

In reading through these letters, I am struck by the wide discrepancy between what they reveal of his childhood and the stories of his childhood that he told his children. He had always told me, for example, that the shattered fingers on his hand were the result of a baseball injury that he was too embarrassed to reveal to his mother. The family letters tell the truth. They were rather the result of his raising his hand at the age of six to fend off truncheon blows, and his mother was too afraid to call a doctor. But it is not these inconsistencies that stand out. Rather, in the tale he told of his life, both his greatest wounds and his greatest comforts did not take such raw physical form. The narrative of his life, as he related it, had as its chapters not beatings but spaces....

My father told me that until he was in his early twenties, he would set out his clothing before he went to sleep and turn his alarm clock to two in the morning. When it rang, he would spring out of bed and dress quickly. For some reason, this made him less anxious. One day he decided to tell his mother about his strange habit. She said to him, “I taught you to do that when you were four, to dress quickly in case the knock comes.” What she meant was a knock of warning, to alert them to a visit by the Gestapo.

Between 1936 and Kristallnacht, the German government flooded public spaces with Gestapo agents. In my grandmother’s memoir, she describes the growing familiarity of the German people with seeing agents appear at doorways, in restaurants, asking for documents, looking for enemies of the people where they were rumored to be. It became typical, normal, ordinary, to see such sweeps. At a certain point, people stopped asking when they saw two agents knocking at the apartment next door. Having agents of the government drop by to remove a neighbor was an event that no longer required an explanation.--Jason Stanley February 02, 2017 "On Becoming the Enemy" The Boston Review [emphasis in original]

It would be a convenient mistake to read Stanley's essay as a slippery-slope-road-to-serfdom warning. Rather, it marks, matter of factually, how far we are already down the slope: deportation (in word and deed) has already been normalized. According to ABC news (not exactly a radical source) last fall, Between 2009 and 2015 [President Obama's] administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who "self-deported" or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

That's a lot of knocking.

Occasionally, after some media-savvy campaign by middle-class school-kids, some European government minister pardons -- what a grotesque word when we are referring to the mere-being-there-of-a-young-child* -- a child, a class-mate, who has lived her whole life in a familiar neighborhood, but such a pardon is a reminder of the legal violence exercised on others.

The previous paragraph may sound unduly cynical. But Mill's harm-principle is the unmovable foundation of a liberalism worth having, and re-discovering time and again. The rest of the trappings of liberal democracy are means, often noble and moral means, to securing this (marshy) ground.

The key concept in Stanley's piece is spaces which (as the quotes above from the essay's start and end reveal) frames it. He uses it primarily to refer to 'public spaces,' in particular the violent removal of particular individuals (including his father) from these spaces. But spaces also refer to the gaps, omissions, even inconsistencies in his father's narrative of his life. Stanley is explicit about the significance of the former: Public spaces are for the people. Stanley reminds the reader that any individual-would-be-even-once-member-of-the-people may well be confused or mistaken about one's membership of the people.

As an aside, I have considerable ambivalence about Jewish testimony about the Nazi era. As a kid I grew allergic to the slogan Never Again, which often, all-too-often just means, Never Again the Jews. It is to his credit that Stanley's essay artfully avoids the moral excesses and cringe-inducing nature of such testimony. Perhaps my ambivalence is really disillusionment: as a young adult, co-existing with Rwanda and Srebrenica, I witnessed the hollowness of the liberal global order when the means to prevent known genocide where available.

So, and to use the previous sentence as a means to return to the main narrative, I wonder if removal from "public spaces" is still a means to removing from "public view," whereby the fate of the removed is "masked" (as it is in Stanley's historical account). My reservation here is not that I am less convinced (which I am) than Stanley that the fate of the Jews was really masked (sie haben es gewusst!). But my point here is not historical. We live in an age of sincerity and shameless public cruelty (e.g., reality TV, talk-show programs, disaster tourism, music videos, etc.). Not to put a delicate point on it, the removal from public spaces today is the opening act of a cruel, public spectacle. (I return to this below.)

The other key concept in Stanley's essay is sign. This is most manifest in Stanley's presentation of the unsentimental education of his father, Manfred Stanley:** His first memories were of his struggle to read the numerous signs on the grand avenues, his initial excitement about his growing mastery of reading tempered by the realization that so many of them were about him. He learned from these signs that he was the enemy, though at that time he could not quite understand what that meant. Signs point to and even define a reality outside themselves. This reality need not be understood for it to be effectual.

To be sure, Stanley is no skeptic; he confidently (the historian in me suggests gently, a bit too confidently) announces that "the family letters tell the truth." And, in fact, to read Stanley's essay is to be reminded how much we still, despite knowing better, take a rule-following Weberian bureaucracy, which accepts the power of and gives power to authenticated documents and paper-records, for granted even in savage circumstances. For, Manfred Stanley's "signed" and numbered "(No. 13888)" Quota Immigration Visa operates as a right-of-exit from Germany and entry-right Stateside for him.**

Weberian bureaucracies can harm even harm grievously (cf. Kafka); but the way they harm is fairly predictable. In reflecting on Stanley's essay, I see our present unease with greater clarity. A few weeks ago green-card holders were detained at airports Stateside in front of cameras and protesting U.S. Senators, even discouraged/prevented from flying back to their homes and communities at foreign airports. I signed up for the ACLU that week-end. But I did so in order to register my dissent. For, the signs may well mark the transformation of Weberian bureaucracy into a different kind of entity.

02/12/2017

Brexit has turned the floodlights on it, exposing, so that all can readily see, the deepest fault line in the politics of Western nations today. It is along this line that the bitterest and most fateful political battles in our time are likely to be fought....What we are seeing is the beginning of a struggle over the character of the international political order itself.

For 350 years, Western peoples have lived in a world in which national independence and self-determination were seen as foundational principles. Indeed, these things were held to be among the most precious human possessions, and the basis of all of our freedoms. Since World War II, however, these intuitions have been gradually attenuated and finally even discredited, especially among academics and intellectuals, media opinion-makers, and business and political elites. Today, many in the West have come to regard an intense personal loyalty to the national state and its right to chart an independent course as something not only unnecessary but morally suspect. They no longer see national loyalties and traditions as necessarily providing a sound basis for determining the laws we live by, for regulating the economy or making decisions about defense and security, for establishing public norms concerning religion or education, or for deciding who gets to live in what part of the world.

But those who have made this transition in fundamental political orientation have done so without making sure that everyone else was on board. Millions of people, especially outside the centers of elite opinion, still hold fast to the old understanding that the independence and self-determination of one’s nation hold the key to a life of honor and freedom. These are people who believe that no one ever consulted them about giving up on the freedom of their nation to protect its people, their interests, and their traditions. And when people think they weren’t consulted about giving up such precious commodities, they are apt to respond in dramatic, harsh, and often violent ways.

This means that the clash of fundamental political assumptions we are watching unfold is already much more extreme than has been fully understood. As what is at stake comes better into focus, political parties will realign. Entire countries will realign. The Brexit vote is only the first shot fired in a protracted conflict that will play itself out throughout the West and elsewhere. Yoram Hazony, 6 september 2016 Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom @Mosaic.

Hazony's words were written in between Brexit and before Trump's (first?) Presidential victory. The piece advances numerous theses worth reflecting on, but the core idea is this: roughly between 1600-1950, Europe (and eventually the world) came to be dominated by a certain Old-Testament inspired, "Protestant construction" of nationalism (implicitly recognized at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648). This construction rejected universal claims of empire (promoted as much by the Catholic church and the heirs to the Holy Roman Empire as the Caliphate) in favor of the nation-state. Around 1950 the construction was displaced by a Pax Americana which produced an elite project of liberal cosmopolitanism that effaced the moral and political foundations of the nation state, both on a global scale and in various regional projects (especially the Europe Union).

The Protestant construction was founded on two (not entirely coherent) principles: "First, the king or ruler, if he is to rule a nation by right, must devote himself to the protection of his people in their life, family, and property, to justice in the courts and the maintenance of the sabbath, and to the public recognition of the one God;" and "second, nations that were cohesive and strong enough to secure their political independence would henceforth be regarded as possessing what later came to be called the right of self-determination, by which was meant the right to govern themselves under their own national constitutions and churches, without interference from foreign powers." On Hazony's reading of the subsequent history, the tension between these two principles proved to be creative, as it promoted creative friction within and among states and (echoing Hume without acknowledgment) competitive emulation. Hazony is fond of the Protestant construction, but he does not ignore its moral blemishes.* It's crucial to his larger argument that these blemishes are bugs not features of the Protestant construction (which he revives, in part, also to re-articulate a fresh vision for Zionism).

Yoram Hazony spends quite a bit of time discussing the significance of the first principle, reading it as embracing "the minimum requirements for a life of personal freedom and dignity for all." One may say, in the language of the eighteenth century, that the Protestant construction embraces a commitment to common humanity, even if this commitment is both differently expressed locally and can sustain very different political orders. Hazony spends less time on the second principle, which is shame because it is Spinozistic in character: it is a variant of might makes right. All nations have a right to self-determination if they can secure it either on the battle-field or through restraint by others. I call it a "variant" because it does not legitimize wars of conquest; Hazony emphasizes (by drawing on his interpretation of the Hebrew Bible) that the second principle also demands a certain amount of restraint--one cannot use one's power to dominate other nations.

By contrast, "the liberal construction of the West is premised on the idea that there is ultimately only one principle at the base of legitimate political order: namely, individual freedom." Hazony traces this ideas to Locke, and he has some fun criticizing Locke's impoverished anthropology which results in a "shocking depreciation of even the most basic bonds that had been thought to hold society together." While Hazony recognizes that Locke is a child of the Protestant construction, he argues that he inspired in others to "tirelessly elaborate this dream-world, working and reworking the liberal vision of human beings freely pursuing property on the basis of consent and without borders."+ This is, in fact, Hazony's main philosophical chargeagainst cosmopolitan liberalism: that it is based on impoverished and unrealistic understanding of human nature. (Here Hazony makes it a bit easy on himself because while he takes Kant's cosmopolitanism to be one of his main targets, he does not recognize that Kant's liberalism is rooted not in Locke's anthropology, but in a very different, thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature.)

Hazony makes a few other charges against the liberal construction (which includes what passes for conservatism, too): it is in contrast to its self-understanding, monist in character. (So, liberals do not understand themselves.) It produces conformity in education, it is "the virtually unquestioned framework for what an educated person needs to know about the political world," which produces jobs and projects for folk so educated,** and it produces a kind of moral ideology that makes modern folk unaware "that there might be intelligent and decent people whose estimation of the worth of such enterprises is drastically different from their own." One side effect is that all particularist or nationalist alternatives to the liberal order and up being "considered akin to racism or fascism." (I have expressed some sympathy for this charge.)

As an aside, sometimes Hazony recognizes that his historical narrative is at times tenuous. After all, the great age of nationalist independence -- decolonization -- occurred during the first few decades of Pax Americana and was at least for a long time not very liberal (nor very Protestant). In addition, while it may be true that there "are people who believe that no one ever consulted them about giving up on the freedom of their nation to protect its people, their interests, and their traditions" it is notable that a good chunk of the electorate that voted leave (the aged) in the Brexit referendum, had in 1975 "expressed significant support for EC membership," given that it was decided "67% in favour on a national turnout of 64%." That is, while Brexit has become framed in terms of a populist revolt against Elites (and Hazony promotes this meme), reality is closer to this being an instance of buyer's regret. Crucially, Hazony implicitly recognizes but does not reflect on the significance of this, that the consent of the governed (a Lockean liberal principle not a Protestant construction principle) is central to legitimacy.

This is not to deny that joining the EU wasn't also an elite project for the UK. But, as Kenneth Clarke pointed out in his speech to the Commons (which closes with Burke), it was a means to maintain the UK's political stature and influence in a world dominated by others after the loss of its empire. For the truth is, for much of the Protestant construction the European powers that accepted a European concert were also imperialists (even Scotland's parliamentary union with England was itself the product of a failed imperial project). So, while it is possible to see in the Protestant construction a progressive unfolding of moral insight such that many of the immoralities produced by it come to be seen for what they are (such a conception of history is certainly available to the historical agents Hazony considers), there is no reason to think that the nation states which participated in the Protestant construction truly recognized the self-limitations that Hazony ascribes to it in his articulation of the second principle. A Europe of nations is a Gaullist principle enunciated once France was within the EU (and had come to terms to the loss of its imperial project).

The conceptual-historical point of the previous paragraph is this: Hazony thinks that under Pax Americana nationalism went into retreat because of a kind of misinterpretation of the Nazi-Germany. On Hazony's reading, it's national-socialism which gave nationalism a bad name. (And, so, Hazony makes an effort to show that Hitler was really an imperialist not a nationalist.) But, of course, among progressive intellectuals it was WWI which revealed the strength and immorality of nationalism (in which the workers turned out to be more loyal to their warlike nation states than amiable, international brotherhood). Rather, the post WWII, cosmopolitan liberal order was founded on the recognition that the age of liberal empires, except the American one, was finished.

None of this is to deny that Hazony may well be right that we're in a age of massive realignment along the lines he suggests.+ One attractive feature of Hazony's attempt to re-aminate and renew the Protestant construction is that it can avoid a clash of civilizations, which (paradoxically enough) is more likely if the West remains wedded to a cosmopolitan, liberal order. (But it is also notable that many of the political ascendant nationalists see the world not as win-win, but fundamentally as zero-sum in which mutual interference is regarded as quite normal.) The question I'll pursue in a follow up post, is if a revitalized version of the Protestant construction is really worth having politically and morally and if Hazony's fundamental claims survive scrutiny.

Another attractive feature of Hazony's attempt is that it does not cede nationalism to those that embrace racism and fascism. In another, follow up post I explore to what degree one can fashion a liberalism out of the best features of the Protestant construction without giving up on liberalism altogether.++

01/31/2017

This morning I was reading a draft chapter by one of my talented PhD students, Laura Georgescu. Her (fascinating!) work is on the edge of my own expertise and so the bibliographic notes are (to me!) not standard, that is, they also involve citations to works that I sometimes would not have encountered before. As it happens one of these involved a reference to a paper published in 1943. This caught my attention because one rarely encounters citations to works published in the midst of war when would be researchers are drafted, rationing is in place, and censorship slows things down; not to mention that some of the stuff that gets published is no better than propaganda (or extremely discrete criticism).

The lecture itself, which has not received the attention it deserves, is methodologically highly interesting because it is based on original research and mixes contextual, counterfactual, and retrospective analysis (especially, but not only, of Halley's magnetic theories). Some other time I hope to return to it (but first Laura needs to defend and get her own work on these matters in print.). I was a bit baffled that Chapman had such a subtle interest in the history of magnetism. (I was only familiar with his work on stochastic processes.) But a quick on-line search revealed that by 1940 he was one of the world's leading scholars of geomagnetism and one of the leading scientists of his age.

Much to my surprise, Chapman allows the war to intrude in his 1943 lecture in his closing lines, which I quote:

For two centuries Halley had no comparable successor in this field, and the magnetic survey of the globe was not renewed with his astounding zeal until in 1905 the young American, Louis Bauer, with the backing of a prince of industry, the one-time poor Scots lad Andrew Carnegie,** resumed the Sisyphean task.

A non-magnetic ship was built for the ocean magnetic survey: unfortunately this was lost by fire in 1929. Later the British Admiralty built another non-magnetic ship, the Research, which should by now have completed its first voyage had war not intervened. We may hope that when peace returns the great work with which Halley so well began will be taken up again with his own vigour.

These words give evidence of (what we may call) a spirit of scientific progress, (a modestly expressed) faith in victory of the Allies ("when peace returns"), as well as a subtle reminder of the opportunity costs of war (science is halted, etc.).

08/26/2016

The initiated, the members of the elite, by virtue of a kind of intuitive and direct perception are aware of the profound innermost thoughts of the leader, know the true secret aims of the movement. And so they are not troubled a whit by the contradictions and inconsistencies in their chief's public utterances: they know that these have only one object: to deceive the crowd, the enemy, the "others," and they adulate the leader who manipulates and practices the lie with such skill. As for the others those who believe they evince by their belief that they are insensible to contradictions, impervious to doubt, incapable of thought. Alexandre Koyré (June 1945) "The Political Function of the Modern Lie," Contemporary Jewish Record, 298-9. [HT MA Khan]

Two of the more fascinating features in Donald Trump's political activity are (a) the brazen calls for unjust measures and (b) his effortless self-contradiction. Koyré's piece analyses both in light of each other. To the best of my knowledge contradictions in public speech are not well understood as such and as a species of propaganda and this explains my interest in Koyré here. Yet it is worth spending some time on (a) first, which Koyré traces back to Bismarck and calls the "second order lie:" because the brazen liar knows knows he "will not be believed by the "others," that his declarations would not be taken seriously by the uninitiated" it is precisely by telling them the truth, that he makes "certain of gulling and lulling his foes." (296)*

Koyré treats the second order lie as part and parcel of the propaganda of totalitarian societies. It fits his larger explanatory scheme because he models public lying, propaganda, and the public use of contradictions on the nature of conspiracy, which has (i) an elite initiated who guard the secret, (ii) the believing (mob) followers, and (iii) the enemy, the "others."** So, for example, the second order lie is (mistakenly) not believed by (iii), but is (correctly) believed by (i-ii). Koyré is clear that the modeling assumptions about human nature (he calls it an 'anthropology') that figure in the conspiracy model are not universal, but (and here he anticipates Arendt) he suggests that in totalitarian societies they can become self-actualizing (an "experimental proof of the doctrine" (300)).

One tricky aspect of the way Koyré's argument is unfolded is that at first it is not entirely clear if he treats the conspiracy model at arm's length (as a model that helps make intelligible the actions of others) or that he embraces its assumptions, too. By the end of the piece it is clear that he treats democracy with a different model, and he announces that he is agnostic about the assumptions of the conspiracy model. (Sadly, he does not model his own philosophical activity either in light of the conspiracy model nor in light of the inverted model he applies to democracy.)

As an aside, Koyré is not well known among philosophers anymore except those with an interest in the history and philosophy of science. This is a bit of shame because his life and intellectual formation are fascinating. His soft-Hegelian treatment of the history of science, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (1957), first presented at Hopkins paved the way for the uptake of Kuhn. [His account of the debate between Huygens/Leibniz and Newton over action at a distance was the target of my first (and, perhaps, best) paper I ever (co) wrote.] Reading "The Political Function of the Modern Lie," which has not been cited much, helps explain his prominence during the cold war--he is an unabashed critic of totalitarianism and he makes fun of the "self-styled social elite" (300) that falls for totalitarian propaganda in liberal democracies and he praises "the popular masses of the democratic countries, alleged to be degenerate and debased, who in accordance with the very principles of totalitarian anthropology have proved they belong to the higher category of humanity, composed of men who think." (300)

To get to the main point: Koyré treats (b) the acceptance of blatant contradictions in political speech of authoritarian leaders as follows: (i) an initiated elite who can see through the contradictions and who understand the true aims of the leader, but who guard the secret, and (ii) the believing (mob) who do not grasp the contradictions because they are -- and this is crucial -- incapable of doubt--they are true believers.

It is notable that in this paper Koyré, who was an accomplished historian of religion, is careful not to stress the analogy with religion/theology. But it is striking that for those who know the history of science, the contours of the Kuhnian model are clear: there is a shared hegemonic paradigm, and the scientific community is divided between worker-bees (who don't grasp the big picture and don't really pay attention to possible contraditions) and the scientific legislators/elite, who understand that they belong to a sect which does not take objections from outsiders (the enemy) seriously. Scientific revolutions are initiated when part of the elite starts contemplating defection (in light of some rather salient anomalies).

Either way, I am not suggesting that Koyré's treatment of contradictions in public speech modeled on conspiracies is fully convincing. Having said that, it is worth noting that Trump invokes conspiracies somewhat regularly (for a funny overview see here). [I am not the first to note the continued relevance of Hofstadter's (1964) "The Paranoid Style in American Politics."] It is part of the logic of a conspiratorial world-view that we can be surrounded by conspiracies. One peculiar feature of this world-view is that the person who sees conspiracies in others can also be itself at the head of a conspiracy surrounded by an inner cabal who can see through the ("funny") rhetoric and devoted followers who are true believers. Koyré's analysis is optimistic because he implies that democratic masses are resistant against it. (This is a bit odd for somebody who lives through the collapse of Weimar and the collapse of the third republic.) Hofstadter's work is, thus, a useful corrective.

To sum up: it is no surprise that in an age of mass media and (purported) transparency, we encounter the second order lie; it is less obvious how contradictions can survive their exposure. Koyré's model may be a useful starting place to start thinking about the prevalence of articulated contradictions in modern political life.

I picked up The Man in the High Castle at an airport recently. I am grateful to the TV series for making it so easily and widely available, but I have not seen the series. The Main the High Castle can be read as imaginative counterfactual history about what would have happened if the Axis powers had won the Second World War and the Axis powers have divided the spoils. It's clever and troubling (it's a world of massive genocide, racial hierarchy, betrayals, censorship, but also uncommon moments of humanity, etc.). Yet within the novel, and arguably the key theme of the story is another book writen by Hawthorne Abendsen [a homage, perhaps, to Asimov's Nightfall or, Wiesel's Night, or, perhaps, Celine's great novel], who has authored The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (itself an allusion, as Wikipedia notes, to Ecclesiastes 12:5). This books is also a counterfactual history, but -- even if you agree that there is no metric for such things -- closer to actual history (the allies win the war, although with plenty of variations from actual history).

We can say, then, that we are explicitly invited to compare two imagined, but institutionally rich worlds to each other. One means for doing so, is by looking at what remains the same in both imagined worlds despite the historical and institutional variation as well as what differs in both worlds despite points of contact. Some other time I want to say more about this, but there is a further complication. For the The Man in the High Castle also goes meta on us (I forget who gave me that phrase recently---apologies!), because the way Abendsen's book is supposed to be interpreted is also a matter of, well, conflicting interpretations throughout the book. And here I want to close with a note on it.

At the end of the The Man in the High Castle by relying on an interpretation of the I Ching(cf here), we are presented with the thought by Juliana (one of the main characters who turns out one of the few heroes of the plot and who is compared to a daemon from the underworld) and Abendsen that the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy has an Inner Truth. (The idea also angers Abendsen.) Remarkably then, we are explicitly invited to consider that books have a surface meaning and an inner truth. A few pages before Juliana had already concluded that the point of Abendsen's book is not about that novel's "make-believe world." She grasps that its inner truth is a commentary on her world (the one in which the Axis won).

We are, thus, invited to treat The Man in the High Castle not just as counterfactual history but also as a commentary on Dick's actual world (ca 1963)--that is on the nature of the civil rights movement and the nature of US imperialism (both issues in the two novels). For example, in Abendsen's imagined world discrimination between 'Whites and Negroes' is ended by the second world war, and US and UK imperialism compete for global victory. How to think about such a commentary in a methodological fashion -- as rigorous as the interpretation of the I Ching -- is for another occasion.

08/22/2016

This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.--Tacitus

For the structuralist the decisive facts about Nazism, for example, are not the ideas, policies or even actions of Hitler and the Nazis, but the structure of the German state, the nature of its bureaucracy and pressure groups, the exigencies of economics and geography. The effect of this structuralist analysis is as Tocqueville predicted. To depreciate the importance of individuals, ideals, and will is to belittle the role of Hitler and the Nazi leaders, to minimize or even deny their avowed intentions of conquest and mass murder, and to evade the issue of evil.--Gertrude Himmelfarb (1991) "Of Heroes, Villains, and Valets" in On Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society (1994), 43-4.

l bumped into Himmelfarb's collection of essays in a second-hand bookstore in Noosa Heads, a resort on Australia's sunshine coast, around the time of the Republican convention. I did not buy it on impulse, but returned to the store to purchase it as a memento to the demise of the Neocon movement. I tend to like reading Conservative thinkers--not just because they tend of a sense of style and flair, but especially because they are contrarians who not only tend to see through the pieties that I hold dear, but also, because of their dismay or disgust, can dissect Liberalism and cultured Liberals better than we do ourselves.

While I intend to return to Himmelfarb's excellent reflections on nineteenth century nationalism, liberalism, and religion Himmelfarb disappoints. Often her engagement with the ideas of those she opposes -- post-modernists, feminists, etc. -- tends to be superficial and lazy. (For example, she primarily relies on Searle's not disinterested not entirely informed, testimonial report when she tries to discuss the disagreement between Derrida and Foucault, ignoring, entirely, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's (recall) more subtle treatment of the significance of that disagreement.) In particular, it's hard for her to exhibit the attractiveness of positions she opposes and in these essays one does not find much generosity toward alternative perspectives to her own.

By contrast, she can be superb in grasping the unwelcome (to her) consequences of some intellectual movements. I have quoted above part of her critique of structuralism (as a method in professional history). Earlier, in an another essay ("On Looking into the Abyss") she gives a chilling account of how social history from below, "Alltagsgeschichte becomes an "apologia" for Nazism." (19)* Throughout her essays one finds her being alert to ways in which Nazi-genocide is normalized and displaced. One does not have to share her fondness for heroes and villains, her confidence in the category and utility of the category of 'evil,' and even her sense that historians to recognize that many attempts at a-moral, scientific history turn into immoral enterprises (while remaining useful for professional advancement and interested parties that prefer a world in which our complicity in injustice is shared widely): the long view, she quotes Trilling's "Tacitus Now," or "seen from a sufficient distance, it says, the corpse and hacked limbs are not so very terrible, and eventually they even begin to compose themselves into a meaningful pattern."" (48) Some Himmelfarb's best lines involve pointing out that often the schemes of scientific history end up being so anachronistic that they fail to do justice to the actors' categories (of even the bad guys).

History-writing need not be a morality tale or sermonizing, one may say on Himmelfarb's behalf, but it cannot forego adopting (one might say) a moral stance in which agents figure. The point of this, it turns out, is not so much to judge others; it's something less moralistic and more political: it's to prevent other, future misdeeds and inspire heroic deeds. One can put Himmelfarb's point in an economic register she does not adopt: by creating a potentially permanent and factual record of base and noble human action, the historian changes the incentive structure of future agents on the fairly modest assumption that people care about what others think of them even if they are dead. Of course, it also follows from this (and, alas, Himmelfarb does not pause to note the point) that such a record may also inspire the (copycat) villains. Seen from this light, one may, then, understand the choice for a more scientific history -- one that rejects the moral stance --, as a kind of risk aversion by historians who wish to remove themselves from impacting posteriority.

07/08/2016

Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."--Lincoln (1865) The Second Inaugural.

In trying to find words to organize the jumble of my thoughts on this week's events Stateside, I was reminded of my second visit to Washington DC with the College Democrats in the early 1990s. One bright night I got bored with the networking and the efforts of the under-aged to obtain drinks, and went with a small group to the Lincoln Memorial. I had never been there. I had discerned that professional politics was not for me. One of my companions mentioned that Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream speech," was given at the base of Lincoln's statue.

A few years before I had visited the Jefferson Memorial and I had struggled with my response. The rhetoric gripped me at first, but over time I came to see in the particular choice of words a clumsy effort at propaganda. I was bracing myself for disappointment as I entered the Lincoln Memorial. And at first, I had to suppress laughter--Lincoln looked just like I imagined him to look and I expected him to stand up and play the part in a cartoon or a third rate horror movie. I recognized the Gettysburg address (recall my post), but the words of the Second Inaugural were unfamiliar. I was horrified and astounded by it: while allowing that God's providential plan may be unknowable, he was treating the suffering of the war inflicted on all parties (both North and South) as divine punishment for the evil of slavery.

I was astounded because I could not imagine a politician, certainly not a war-time leader, magnifying the voters' sins back at them. I had come to assume that while democratic political leadership was coextensive with some truth, it primarily entailed a form of flattery of the people by the politician. That Lincoln's stance had seemed impossible to me, made me feel not just physically small in his statue's presence, but I suddenly saw that my purported knowing-ness and realism revealed itself as underestimating democratic, no human, possibility.

I was awestruck, yet angry.

His words horrified and angered me because it reminded me of the Rabbinic argument that I had encountered as a teenager that the Holocaust was divine punishment of the Jews' sins. My teenage (modestly existentialist) self earnestly opted for nihilism given the choice between meaning-less suffering or a God that inflicts such (disproportionate) horrors on his creatures. (I didn't recognize that if God existed, my choice would seem comic to her.) Since, I learned that God is not required for the stance I rejected; I sometimes spot secular versions of a divine retribution theory (e.g., austerity measures inflicted on 'lazy' populations).

I have come to recognize the moral majesty of Lincoln's great sense of shared complicity in evil. And I am impressed by his willingness to entertain, subtly, such public doubt in God's possession of the attribute of justice and his sense of the absurdity even blasphemy of so much prayer. Yet, whether he believed his own words or not, I revolted against the embrace of divine retribution because (as a doctrine/explanatory principle) it seems biased against history's victims--it victimizes them twice over. Even so, while steady in my rejection of this theology, as the years have passed, I have come to wonder whether Lincoln's greatness and his theology are inseparable. (I am not claiming this theology is sufficient for greatness!)